07/22/09 – James Bamford – The Scott Horton Show

It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and we're streaming live worldwide at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show James Bamford.
It's because of him, really, that we all know so much about the National Security Agency.
It used to be called No Such Agency, but we all know that there is indeed such an agency, and in great part that's because of Jim Bamford's work, Body of Secrets, before that the Puzzle Palace, then Body of Secrets, a pretext for war, and the new one is the Shadow Factory.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Oh, good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I see you have a new article in Salon.com that's running in today's issue here.
The NSA is still listening to you.
Bush went away, but domestic surveillance overreach didn't.
It's now the law, and the ACLU is fighting back.
Is that so?
The ACLU is fighting back, Jim?
Yeah, that's right.
I think the hearing was today.
It's a case that's similar to the case that I was a part of about a year or so ago after the New York Times revealed the existence of the warrantless eavesdropping.
I joined the ACLU lawsuit against the NSA.
I was a plaintiff in the case, and we actually won in lower court.
The judge ruled in our favor and said that the NSA had violated the law and violated the Constitution, but then when we got to the appeals court, the appeals court said that because they couldn't prove standing, they couldn't prove that we were being eavesdropped on, largely because the NSA wouldn't admit who they were eavesdropping on, the case was dismissed when it got up to the appeals court, basically.
So what the ACLU is doing now is they're bringing a new lawsuit, and this time challenging the constitutionality of the new law that was created last summer to sort of codify the warrantless eavesdropping.
Well, that's a pretty fun catch-22 they have you in.
Obviously, here you are, you're a journalist, you've written now three books about the National Security Agency, you have contacts that you talk to all over the world in doing your journalism, and clearly have a pretty good reason to suspect, at least, that your phone might be one that the NSA had tapped in what we know was an illegal wiretapping program that was active, as reported by yourself, and obviously by Reisman and Lickblau and the New York Times and everywhere else, and yet the legal game, perhaps it is a political game, the legal game is to say, Judge, we don't have to release any of these national security secrets to this plaintiff whatsoever, to your court, and then the judge turns around and says, I'm sorry, Mr. Bamford, you do not have standing to sue, because you have no proof that they've tapped your phone, and you don't have any ability to force them through discovery to admit whether they've tapped your phone or not, to see whether the lawsuit can proceed.
Is that basically right?
Yeah, it's sort of like Alice in Wonderland, or, you know, catch-22, you can't sue unless you can prove that they're eavesdropping.
Yeah, that sounds like the kind of law you'd have in Libya or someplace.
That's right.
So, the bottom line is that they continued doing what they were doing all along, and then last summer, even though President Obama had mentioned that he was going to not only vote against the law, but he was going to filibuster against it, he ended up joining in the group that passed the legislation last summer, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, that basically codified what the Bush administration was doing.
And what they've done is basically neutralized the effect of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Under the old law, the FISA Court had jurisdiction over who was being eavesdropped on, so if they wanted to eavesdrop on you or me or anybody else in the U.S., they would have to go through the court.
And now they pretty much neutralized the court, and the result is that a lot of Americans could be eavesdropped on without any third party having a say in it.
Well, and so that's really an important step, right?
Let's go back a little bit to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Obviously you had the abuses of Watergate, where Richard Nixon was using the national security state against all of his political enemies, and they had the church committee hearings, things were way out of control.
So what exactly did the FISA Court say about, obviously there's a lower threshold of evidence required to get a warrant to tap the phone of someone who is suspected of being an agent of a foreign power or an agent of a foreign terrorist group, certainly lower than probable cause.
But I guess what you're saying is the Bush administration program, and now what the Democratic Congress has legalized, and Barack Obama apparently is continuing to pursue, is a FISA Court that has much less power to review individual cases than before.
Is that basically it?
It's still there, but it might as well not be.
That's right.
They don't really have the right to decide who's being eavesdropped on.
They now are relegated to the position where all they can do is decide upon the methods by which the NSA is doing its eavesdropping.
In other words, it's sort of generalized, you can do this kind of eavesdropping or you can do that kind of eavesdropping, but the NSA no longer has to run names, all the names of the people it's going to eavesdrop on past the court.
So it's weakened the court a great deal in that sense, and that's now the law, and that is why I think the ACLU is truly the only organization out there that's fighting that.
We went through it once a couple years ago, and now the ACLU is trying it again, and hopefully we'll get a better outcome this time.
Well, as John Yoo and Jay Bybee commented in a bit different context, they were talking about the Geneva Conventions being quaint and obsolete.
Perhaps this is quaint and obsolete, but the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution reads, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
So I guess if we take that at face value, Jim, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as it existed in 1978 already was unconstitutional, and now it's basically rendered this, the situation we're in now after all these amendments and violations and everything else, is that this Fourth Amendment has been rendered almost meaningless, or perhaps completely meaningless.
Am I going too far?
Well, I think, yeah, you're on the right track.
I think it has been rendered largely meaningless at this point.
And what makes this even more dangerous and serious at this point is that, as I mentioned in the Salon article today, the NSA is in the process of building these enormous data storage facilities.
They're just starting on one in Utah this summer, and that data storage facility is going to be a million square feet.
It's going to cost close to $2 billion.
Help me out here, Jim.
How big is a million square feet?
I mean, a football stadium, or?
I have no idea how to compare that.
The Capitol building of Utah, the state where they're building this facility, the Capitol building of Utah could fit in there three times over.
Wow.
So, it's just very enormous, a million square feet.
I mean, they pick it out there because it has the space and also they have the energy capability.
The amount of energy that's going to go into this facility, this very new NSA data storage facility, will take – I forgot the exact number, but it was the equivalent of all the energy that's used for powering all the homes in Salt Lake City.
So, it's an enormous facility, both in terms of size and power.
And the reason they need so much power is because they're not just going to store data there, but they're going to process it.
They're going to data mine it.
They're going to search through it for whatever they're looking for, and that was one of the other problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act that was passed last summer.
It puts very few restrictions on NSA in terms of what it does with the information that it picks up, in terms of how long it can keep it and what it can do with it and so forth.
So, that's another problem.
Now, they're building this, as I mentioned, this huge facility in Utah, and they're also completing another facility down in San Antonio that's almost the size of the Alamo, though.
Now, these are both brand new.
They haven't even officially opened yet, but this is all because of the opening the floodgates on NSA and letting them eavesdrop on all this communication, and not only eavesdropping on it, but then storing it and data mining it.
Well, one of the ways you helped me understand this in one of our previous interviews, I think, and I forget whether you make this exact analogy in the book, which is again called The Shadow Factory, the ultra-secret NSA from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America.
In one of these interviews, Jim, you said, think how much data you can store on a thumb drive nowadays, a little bitty flash drive, or how much data you can store on the most advanced new iPod or what have you.
And then you're talking about a building the size of the Alamo Dome, another building the size of three Utah state capitals, basically fitting that much storage on there.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
It helps people.
I guess you also explain in how many libraries of Congress per second worth of information.
Things like this, right?
To help people understand how much data we're really talking about here.
Well, and yeah, to give another perspective on this, there was another study that just came out about a month ago by the MITRE Corporation, which is a defense contractor, basically a think tank for the Pentagon.
And they came out with a study on storing data because the intelligence community is pulling in so much data that there's speculation now that within a few years, the U.S. government is going to need the ability to store what's called a Yodabyte of data.
A Yodabyte.
I think that's the one with 24 zeroes after it.
Did you say a Yodabyte?
Yeah.
Yodabyte is, you know, you have gigabytes and terabytes, and then you get petabytes and you keep going up, and the highest number that's been invented yet is called a Yodabyte.
And so there's speculation now that within a few years, the government is going to, with all its surveillance, is going to be able to reach a Yodabyte full of data.
I mean, a Yodabyte, you can hardly imagine what a Yodabyte is.
I think, like I said, one with 24 zeroes after it.
So you're talking about enormous amounts of information.
I think I figured out at one point it was, I think it was six trillion pages of data.
So you're in numbers where you can't even imagine the quantities at this point.
But that's why you need storage facilities, you know, as big as the Alamo Dome and as big as the Million Square.
Well, people, Jim, people must be saying to themselves right now, oh, well, good.
These people are so swamped in data, they'll never notice me or care about me, right?
I must be safe if these people are absolutely drowning in a literal galaxy worth of ones and zeroes.
Well, you'd think that, but, you know, when I was writing The Shadow Factory, which actually came out last October, and then this month it's coming out in paperback, but one of the people I interviewed for the book was Adrienne Kenney, and she was a, what they call a voice interceptor.
She was a, you know, a person who actually did the eavesdropping, the interception of the communication that the NSA was picking up.
And she was saying that among the people that they were targeting, that they picked up and they were listening to was journalists overseas, aid workers, and so forth, and these were people calling back to the U.S. and talking to their editors or talking to their families.
One reason she decided to become a whistleblower was because she didn't like the idea that the agency was eavesdropping on their intimate bedroom phone conversation.
These are people calling home and talking to their wives or their husbands or spouses about, you know, personal matters.
And she protested internally and said we shouldn't be doing this according to the rules and regulations that were in effect when she was working, doing this before 9-11.
Nobody was ever allowed to do anything like that.
And so she was very angry and she protested internally and she eventually protested to the Senate Intelligence Committee and they did nothing.
And then finally, once her words and her actions were revealed in my book, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided to do an investigation.
But, you know, these are the types of things that people think, oh, I'm not going to be eavesdropped on, but they are.
And the other danger, I think, that people don't realize is when you're doing data mining and you're eventually putting people on watch lists and the watch list now is getting close to a million names on the watch list.
It was half a million names when I was working on my book and now it's getting upwards, closer to a million names now.
Well, in fact, there are even there are even members of the administration, Jim, who've talked about that anybody whose name is on the terrorist watch list shouldn't be able to own a gun.
Exactly right.
Yeah, it's just irony there.
Well, but what's really dangerous here is you're getting all these names on the watch list and a lot of them are coming from this arbitrary data mining and all that.
And so you could have a situation where somebody is living in a house and the person before them, they moved out and they knew people moved in some house in the middle of Midwest or whatever.
And the person before them had a subscription to Al Jazeera and they called once a week or so to the Middle East.
And now these new people, the Smiths or the Jones or whoever, move into the house and now their name is associated with that address.
And all of a sudden their name ends up on the watch list and there's different levels of the watch listing.
They might not be on the watch list that gets them thrown off airplanes.
So they actually would know that they're on the watch list.
But there's other watches where their names just go on and when other government agencies check the watch list, they find their name on it.
So suppose the person is applying for a small business administration and the odds are it probably gets turned down if their name is on that list and they won't be told being turned down because of that.
Or their son or daughter wants to go to one of the military academies because the address shows up at that address, a suspicious address or whatever.
They won't get in.
They're not going to be told, well, you have a suspicious address, but they just won't get in.
They won't know why.
So there's a lot of subtlety here.
I mean, you're talking about a million people, close to a million people that are on this list now and it's continually growing.
And you have this data mine that has very little regulation and control over it.
And then the storage of the data.
Who wants their private conversations, especially if they're bedroom conversations, you know, stored in some warehouse in Texas or Utah or wherever for somebody to go through.
And one of the other people I interviewed for the book was another NSA voice interceptor down at the major listening post, the NSA's biggest listening post in the state of Georgia, the U.S. state of Georgia.
And he was saying that whenever they got one of those phone calls, they'd pass it around the office and all laugh and giggle about it.
And a lot of these were actually soldiers over there in Iraq calling home to their spouses and they were eavesdropping on those calls and laughing about it, passing it around and so forth.
So, you know, this is you hear all this very elevated language when the Congress is talking about these things or the administration is talking about these things.
But when it gets down to the working level, this is what happens.
You know, they're picking up average Americans who are laughing over bedroom conversations, destroying this data.
And those are the things that Congress doesn't pay much attention to.
Well, and, you know, returning soldiers are listed by the Department of Homeland Security as possible terrorist threats.
And you've got to look out for soldiers that come home.
Obviously, they've all been stabbed in the back and sent off to at least see their buddies die in wars for nothing.
And soldiers like that might come home mad.
And so Homeland Security, it's not just you know, I don't want people to come away with the impression.
I don't think you want people to come away with the impression that if there's if there's illegal spying, immoral spying going on, it's it's simply trivial things.
You know, people might feel pretty violated if someone's listening in to their phone call with their spouse, but they might not take that as seriously as the what amounts to the Defense Department, I guess, and the NSA is a military organization, right?
Keeping track of of political activists of any description, especially when the term terrorism, as defined by our federal government, seems to be getting broader and broader to include all types of political dissent from left, right, center, libertarian or anywhere else.
Well, I think that's one of the biggest concerns is the fact that the government can begin using this new technology to begin, you know, focusing on people that are actually doing protests.
That's what happened in the 1960s when, you know, Congress sort of let the ball slip and didn't do the oversight.
And that's the kind of eavesdropping that was being done, was being done on antiwar protesters and so forth.
So we were now involved in a variety of wars, seem to be in Iraq.
And now we're in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We're expanding the war in Afghanistan and so forth.
And we had a lot of people pushing us to get involved in a war with Iran and so forth.
And and so this whole idea of spying on protesters starts to have a ring about the ring about it, like what was going on in Iran not too long ago.
Right.
The government taking control of the Internet and so forth.
And that's one of the things that I think you have to worry about here is the fact that if you have very little oversight of what the government can do, then the government is going to push it to the ultimate extreme.
That's what happened after 9-11.
I mean, it got so bad that you had the the Attorney General of the United States, Deputy Attorney General, the director of the FBI, and about a dozen other officials all within a day of resigning because of what was going on.
They weren't you know, they wouldn't be taking that action unless something was extremely illegal.
So, you know, it really worries me because the fact that Congress just looks the other way when a lot of these things go on.
Well, let's stick with that point right there, because what these men were threatening to resign over and I'm sorry because I really haven't had time to study the new IG report.
I'm sure you've taken a look at it, but I read a couple of articles.
I think Glenn Greenwald said pointed to a few different pieces of evidence in here that what these men were threatening to resign over is more about the so so-called total information awareness, complete data mining kind of thing that you write about in your book, The Shadow Factory, rather than being simply over what Rice and Lickblau wrote about in The Times, about the the actual listening in on phone calls.
There was much more to this that they were really concerned about.
Is that right?
Well, yeah, I think what what largely dealt with was the data mining.
And one of the sort of frightening aspects of that, such as general reports that came out, is the the fact that they said that the the new codified law or the new law that was codified a lot of what was being done during the Bush administration by NSA under the new law is more.
They're doing more under the new law than they were under the warrantless wiretapping.
So it's expanded even greater than it was during the secret period when when the Bush administration was hiding what they were doing.
So, yeah, that's the problem is now that they've turned this into new law, it's expanded from where it was in the first place.
And that's another large danger.
But as you mentioned, it was not just the phone calls, but what apparently was the triggering factor causing them to consider resigning was the data mining, going through all the email, the enormous interception of email that they were doing.
Well, now, is there any real argument at all, Jim, that this really is a terrorist surveillance program or is the policy to vacuum up as much information as can possibly be compiled about each and every one of us?
Well, you know, another thing that came out in that report was which was extremely enlightening was the fact that nobody could point to a major success from all this eavesdropping from the time the Bush administration started the warrantless eavesdropping program in October of 2001 to the present time, or at least during that entire time period, there was no major success in finding some terrorists.
And during this, you know, during that period of time, there are all kinds of terrorist actions around the world.
There was the bombing in London, the bombing in Madrid, there were bombings in East Africa and so forth.
So, you know, there was there was a tremendous amount of terrorist activity that was taking place, but the administration was never able to find it out using this warrantless eavesdropping activity.
Well, and I guess, you know, I'm no gumshoe myself.
You're you pretty much are in the role that you perform as an investigative journalist.
Could it be the case that trying to vacuum up everyone in zero in the world every day is not necessarily the best approach to trying to figure out what's going on and and who might be planning an attack on the American people?
Or is it just that Al-Qaeda hardly ever existed?
And that September 11th attack was the last gasp Hail Mary pass and the best they could ever do anyway.
Well, you know, the ultimate irony here, and I go into it fairly extensively in the shadow factory, is the fact that in the entire lead up to September 11th, the NSA had all the information it needed to stop the plot.
It was eavesdropping, actually eavesdropping on the terrorists was actually eavesdropping on their communications the entire time they were over here in the US.
At one point, they set up their final base of operations just two miles from NSA headquarters.
And so NSA was listening to them while they were in the United States.
Problem was the NSA never passed that information on to either the FBI or the CIA.
So whatever legal authority it needed, it had it back then without all the warrantless eavesdropping, and it completely dropped the ball.
So now to make up for it, they've they've expanded NSA's capability.
And the problem now is that they're pulling in so much material they can't analyze it all.
So they've gone from having probably just about the right amount of capability pre 9-11, when they were able to discover these terrorists, having far too much information than they could ever go through at this point.
Well, you know, it's been a while since we've covered this subject, and I guess it's been a couple of books since you wrote about this part of it.
But you cover quite a bit of ground about the September 11th plot in your book, A Pretext for War and also in the Shadow Factory.
And I was just reading something in The Washington Post here about the torture of Abu Zubaydah, where they say that it was when they started or when they stopped or one of these points when they were torturing this guy is when they first found out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Youssef's uncle, had anything to do with Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network.
Is that your reporting?
Do you remember that?
I'm not you know, I'm sure you don't have your notes right in front of you.
But does that sound right?
Just ask that question again.
That that in 2002 sometime while beating it out of Abu Zubaydah was the first time that they found out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was friends with Osama, was part of al-Qaeda.
Well, actually, I think they knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was associated with with al-Qaeda before then.
I mean, I'm not exactly sure what you're reading there, but they he was sort of off on his own with with Ramzi Youssef at one point when they were plotting the first World Trade Center.
And then they went off and they were engaged in terrorism activities or at least plotting terrorism activities in the Philippines.
And and then they say, well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed left the Philippines when they began closing in on him.
And he went to that point.
That's when he went to Afghanistan.
And that's when he joined al-Qaeda basically with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan at that point.
Well, that's what I thought I remembered from your reporting.
But I guess the the point in contention here, I guess, then would be this Washington Post article.
It's called Internal Rifts on Road to Torment by Jobi Warwick and Peter Finn from Sunday, July 19th.
But I guess the sticking point would be when the Americans figured out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had and I guess even Ramzi Youssef, before he got captured, had already made friends with Osama in this in this article.
They're saying they didn't figure that out until they were beating it out of Abu Zubaydah.
But maybe that's justification, simply justification for beating anything out of him.
Well, they certainly should have known, I think, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was associated with Osama bin Laden at that point.
They, matter of fact, tried to capture him, I think, when he stopped in one of the Emirates in Dubai or someplace.
And that's when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went to Afghanistan and joined Osama bin Laden.
So I haven't I didn't see that article, so I'm not sure what it said.
But that was my belief was that, you know, I think they had an indication that he was associated with Osama bin Laden before 9-11.
But I'd have to read the article to check that out.
Mm hmm.
All right.
Well, and and for all the 9-11 conspiracy theorists flipping out in the comments section when this MP3 is finally posted, I would respectfully ask that you read a pretext for war and the Shadow Factory and James Bamford as one example of a real journalist taking a look at the 9-11 issue before you come at me with all your thermite and things over it.
But anyway, so so I guess I wanted to talk about how I flew and stopped in Salt Lake City and then flew out of there again.
I got to look at quite a bit of it out the window.
That's a huge city for the amount of electricity, you say, basically about the same quantity of electricity or however you measure that same amount of electricity is going to be required to run the NSA's database here.
I guess I still want to try to get you to shock people in the audience with just how much surveillance power this national government really has right now.
Their hair ought to be standing on end or we haven't quite got it right yet up here.
Well, yeah, the the amount of space that they're talking about, I was not talking about, they've already committed to a million square feet of space, which is just a gigantic you can hardly imagine a million square feet of spaces.
Like I said, it was you take the state capital of Utah and you could put it in there over three times, three times over.
And then the amount of data you could put on on a flash drive, just a thumb sized flash drive today is two gigabytes.
So you could figure how much I mean, you just sort of imagine how much data will go in there.
And at the same time, you have the government think tank trying to come up with ways of or trying to establish how much data will be pulled out by the intelligence community and their estimates up to into the unit of bytes at this point, which is, I think, as I mentioned, that was one with 24 zeros after just a number almost beyond comprehension.
Yeah, we're approaching a Google.
That's where that term comes from, right?
The one with 100 zeros after it.
I got a name for the search engine.
That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, I think that's a trillion or something like that.
So, yeah, it gets very you're into an entirely different world when you're getting up in those those numbers.
Well, let me ask you this.
I'm sure you heard the breaking story over there at CQ Politics, Jeff Stein, about the NSA and the FBI in a program.
We're targeting an Israeli spy in Washington, D.C., and by chance overheard that Israeli spy on the phone with Congresswoman Jane Harman.
And I wonder if you were surprised that this Israeli spy was being tapped and didn't know it since his buddies in the Mossad were the ones who wrote the software that runs all the NSA's wiretapping equipment.
Well, I, you know, I think they realize that the US eavesdrops on a lot of the embassy communications, but the person or the person who was the suspected spy was probably calling from some phone that he didn't think that the either the NSA or the FBI was eavesdropping on.
And that's why he was talking to Jane Harman at that point.
I think this is something that really needs a lot of investigation.
Here you have the very senior member of the House Intelligence Committee discussing a very sensitive issues with somebody who's apparently a Israeli agent.
And and yet, you know, there's never been any real concrete investigation of that.
Then, you know, one of the things that Jeff Stein came out with when he was interviewing Larry Franklin, who was the Pentagon employee who passed the information on to the AIPAC people and, you know, originally got a sentence of over 12 years for it.
During that case, while that case was pending, what Jeff Stein was able to determine from his interview with Franklin was the fact that somebody came up to Franklin and suggested that Franklin disappear and make it look like he he had been killed or make it look like he had died.
And that way, avoid having to testify against the two AIPAC people again.
I mean, that's another thing that really needs to be investigated.
Franklin himself was very, very scared.
He he thought that the person wanted to to really kill him.
I mean, to do not a pretend killing, but an actual killing.
Right.
Yeah, it's much easier, much easier to murder you after you've already faked your own death and nobody's going to miss you.
Well, exactly.
You know, that sounds to me, I mean, the point here I think that you're making, you don't raise your voice in indignation quite enough.
I don't think, Jim, this ought to be the movie of the week.
This is the most incredible thing in the whole world.
Israeli spy.
I mean, you could make a whole series of Sopranos episodes about something like this.
This is huge news.
And yet virtually uncovered outside of Congressional Quarterly.
Well, yeah.
And especially when you're talking about the average citizens here, this Franklin at the time was the Pentagon's top Iran expert in the Office of Policy, the person who was the Iran expert for Doug Spice.
And, you know, then the other person who's involved in this is Jane Harmon, who was the number two person on the House Intelligence Committee at the time.
So and here she was, you know, she was just doing anything she could do to try to become the actual chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
And there's, you know, some of these discussions, there was this potential bribe where they were talking about this wealthy pro-Israeli donor.
And I think it was in California who the suggestion was that he was going to make a or the suggestion, I think, was that he was going to make it difficult if she didn't, you know, go the way they wanted to or whatever.
Well, and Jeff Stein also, in fact, followed up on his blog that at least according to one source, I think maybe he said two sources, that they had more information that, in fact, Haim Sabin, that donor you're talking about, that he in fact had threatened Nancy Pelosi, that he would make life difficult for her and withhold contributions.
And whether or not she had already been tipped off by the CIA, I'm not sure.
But apparently she reacted very negatively against that.
And that was also overheard was the Israeli spy reporting back to Jane Harman that, well, we tried it.
Haim Sabin talked to Pelosi and she flipped out and got really mad.
And so, I mean, boy, yeah, again, it sure seems like top headline movie of the week material.
And I guess The New York Times and The Washington Post each did one story on it, confirmed it, developed it a bit and then left it.
That's it.
Yeah, it wasn't nobody even bothered to look into it until Jeff Stein happened to break the story.
And then, you know, they simply did a few, as you mentioned, a few follow ups.
And and that was it.
Well, let me ask you this.
Let me ask.
Pardon me.
Pardon me.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, where were the news magazines?
Where's Time magazine?
Where's the Newsweek on a lot of this stuff?
You know, where's the, you know, all this investigative reporting that they did on on Bill Clinton's sex life, you know, why don't we get a little bit of that on something that's far more important?
Yeah, well, I'm not really sure.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll just leave it there.
We're already way over time and left our Chaos Radio audience behind.
But I'll go ahead and thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jim.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Jim Bamford.
He is the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, A Pretext for War and The Shadow Factory.
The ultra secret NSA from 9-11 to the eavesdropping on America.